Modern
Physical Organic
Chemistry

Eric V. Anslyn
The University of Texas, Austin

Dennis A. Dougherty
California Institute of Technology

NOW IN ITS THIRD PRINTING

"Students
and others are emphatically recommended to read this excellent book. "Anslyn
& Dougherty" should be in every chemical library. It will be a
valuable aid to every student, but it can also be strongly recommended for all
research chemists as a reference source on physical-organic chemistry. The book
is a worthwhile investment."--Angewandte Chemie, 2006, 45, 1019-1020

Modern
Physical Organic Chemistry
is a most impressive resource for researchers and teachers, and yet it also
offers an accessible entree into the topics for advanced undergraduates and
postgraduates. Each chapter ends with a "Summary and Outlook", an
excellent array of problems and exercises and a comprehensive bibliography that
often refers to the review literature. This type of text is often not easily
accessible to the undergraduate reader, but I found this one to be well
structured and very pleasant to read. Modern Physical
Organic Chemistry is a book I am very happy to have on my shelf. --The Times Higher, 2006

"Spectacular!
Congratulations! I plan to recommend it to all of my research group members and
to those students in my class who are getting hooked on organic chemistry.
This is going to be a winner."--Peter Vollhardt, University of California at Berkeley

"Anslyn
and Dougherty have done an admirable and scholarly job to put the essence of
this important subject between the covers of a single text. I can
enthusiastically recommend the text for anyone who is teaching a course dealing
with the essentials of physical organic chemistry and more."--Nicholas J. Turro, Columbia University

“The text will certainly
inspire those coming to physical organic chemistry as a first love, as well as
those coming from a bordering discipline who wish to acquire the insight that
physical organic chemistry can provide.”--Barry Carpenter, Cornell
University

“This
much needed text places physical organic chemistry in its most modern context as
the foundation of not only organic chemistry, but as the basis for understanding
the most current research in supramolecular chemistry, organic materials
science, catalysis, and organometallics. This book is the new authoritative physical organic resource that
will benefit researchers, students, and teachers alike.”--Timothy M. Swager, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"By building
the text from the ground up, the authors have managed to incorporate modern
applications of the theories of physical organic chemistry throughout, in a
way that no revision of an existing text can hope to accomplish." –Thomas Poon, Claremont Colleges

"This
is a high quality book that fills a real need in our field, and that makes every
other book in this area immediately obsolete. Congratulations to the authors on
a remarkable achievement!"–David I. Schuster, New York
University
This
is the first modern textbook, written in the 21st century, to make
explicit the many connections between physical organic chemistry and critical
fields such as organometallic chemistry, materials chemistry, bioorganic
chemistry, and biochemistry.
In the latter part of the 20th century, the field of physical organic
chemistry went through dramatic changes, with an increased emphasis on
noncovalent interactions and their roles in molecular recognition,
supramolecular chemistry, and biology;the development of new materials withnovel structural features; and the use of computational
methods.Contemporary chemists must
be just as familiar with these newer fields as with the more established
classical topics.

This
completely new landmark text is intended to bridge that gap. In addition
to covering thoroughly the core areas of physical organic chemistry –
structure and mechanism – the book will escort
the practitioner of organic chemistry into a field that has been thoroughly
updated.The
foundations and applicabilities of modern computational methods are also
developed.

Written
by two distinguished researchers in this field, Modern
Physical Organic Chemistry can serve as a text for a year-long course
targeted to advanced undergraduates or first-year graduate students, as well as
for a variety of shorter courses on selected aspects of the field.It will also serve as a landmark new reference text, and as an
introduction to many of the more advanced topics of interest to modern
researchers. An accompanying Student
Solutions Manual by Michael Sponsler is also available.

The
AuthorsEric V. Anslyn, right, received his PhD in Chemistry
from the
California Institute of Technology under the direction of Robert Grubbs.
After completing post-doctoral
work with Ronald Breslow at Columbia University, he joined the faculty at the
University of Texas at Austin, where he became a Full Professor in 1999.
He currently holds four patents and is the recipient of numerous awards and
honors, including the Presidential Young Investigator, the Alfred P. Sloan
Research Fellow, the Searle Scholar, the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and the
Jean Holloway Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is also the Associate
Editor for the Journal of the American
Chemical Society and serves on the editorial boards of Supramolecular
Chemistry and the Journal of
Supramolecular Chemistry. His primary research is in physical organic
chemistry and bioorganic chemistry, with specific interests in catalysts for
phosphoryl and glycosyl transfers, receptors for carbohydrates and enolates,
single and multi-analyte sensors – the development of an electronic tongue,
and synthesis of polymeric molecules that exhibit unique abiotic secondary
structure.

Dennis A.
Dougherty, below, received a PhD from
Princeton with Kurt Mislow, followed by a year of postdoctoral study with Jerome
Berson at Yale. In 1979 he joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where he is now George Grant Hoag Professor of Chemistry. Dougherty's
extensive research interests have taken him to many fronts, but he is perhaps
best known for development of the cation-π interaction, a novel but potent
noncovalent binding interaction.More
recently, he has addressed molecular neurobiology, developing the in vivo nonsense suppression method for unnatural amino acid
incorporation into proteins expressed in living cells.This powerful new tool enables “physical organic chemistry on the
brain” - chemical-scale studies of the molecules of memory, thought, and
sensory perception and the targets of treatments for Alzheimer's disease,
Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, learning and attention deficits, and drug
addiction. His
group is now working on extensive experimental and computational studies
of the bacterial mechanosensitive channels MscL and MscS, building off the
crystal structures of these channels recently reported by the Rees group at
Caltech.